Public sector 2 YEARS behind biz on cloud adoption - suppliers Public sector adoption of the cloud is some two years behind the private sector and suppliers, as well as government, need to up their game to raise awareness. Just £2.7m was finally spent by government IT bods on the first iteration of of its cloud computing framework - G-Cloud - indeed it seems a shift away from traditional …
Another success for the public sector.
If everyone else jumped of the cliff it doesn't mean you should. There are some advantages to "the cloud" or "the effing cloud" but there are also some pretty large downsides. There are some massive downsides to keeping everything in house too but in some areas of the public sector the only way to keep the show on the road is to keep everything in house. For example some of the data and services provided need to be 100% confidential and records kept for x number of years, I'm sure there are private organisations with similar regulations too who have also hit this issue and possibly resolved it in the cloud and good luck to them, I've got an issue with this as well as maintaining the current flexibility of some of our systems.
As someone who works in public sector IT (in case you hadn't guessed) one of my problems is running a public sector environment on a public sector budget but delivering an enterprise environment with the flexibility of "the old days" without any buy in from upstairs or the users. An environment that has grown organically over 30 years into a bespoke living organism with interdependencies that will not die does not lend itself to compartmentalisation and hiving off to a 3rd party who can offer the same level of service as we currently do, cheaper than us and still make a profit.
I'm sure in time distributed computing will begin to make my life easier but at the moment the costs outweigh the benefits, until this changes I'd maintain my Grandpa Simpson stance:
http://www.globalnerdy.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/grandpa_simpson_yelling_at_cloud.jpg
Public sector spots that the cloud is a bit of a swizz and the figures don't act up.
Offering a cloud service? Is it all in the EEA? If not then in general it's feck all use to the public sector who deal with massive amounts of data covered by the DPA.
Oh and don't forget to tell the CEO about the massive redundant pipe he'll need to install to access those services he has shifted to the cloud should the main one go tits up.
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